Alfred Dreyfus

THE MAN ON DEVIL’S ISLAND: Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided France

By RUTH HARRIS

Allen Lane, 2011, 542 pages, $26.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The Dreyfus Affair in France a century ago shows how little has changed. As Ruth Harris recounts in her book on Alfred Dreyfus, ‘national security’ was on the lips of every French politician and military officer as an innocent man from a vilified group was framed for treason in a rigged military court and sent to rot in a prison hell-hole to serve political ends during a time of war hysteria. For Alfred Dreyfus substitute David Hicks and the template still fits.

Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French Army, was accused by the military in 1894 of spying for Germany. The French Minister of War, wanting to be seen as tough on Germany, nabbed the nearest, vaguely-plausible suspect. The evidence against Dreyfus was gossamer-thin and the real spy (a debt-ridden army officer) was soon fingered by a conscientious army intelligence officer but a secret dossier, bulked out to a crushing 370 items with forged and tenuous evidence, was used to convict Dreyfus.

Dreyfus’ German accent (common to all French residents of his German-occupied French homeland, Alsace-Lorraine) and his Jewish religion (used as part of an alarmist, anti-Semitic scare about a global Jewish conspiracy and subversion within) were the racist nails in a court martial closed to public scrutiny.

Imprisoned on Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guiana in South America, Dreyfus spent five years in solitary confinement, shackled in sweltering heat, enduring fever and malnutrition, his teeth rotting, his legs and voice atrophying. He was not supposed to survive.

A campaign to free Dreyfus, however, changed all that, sparked by the novelist, Emile Zola, whose polemical broadside, J’accuse, charged France’s military and political hierarchies with complicity in the political stitch-up. Conscionable Republicans united with socialists and anarchists under the banner of ‘Truth and Justice’ whilst the Catholic Church, anti-Semites and anti-parliamentarian monarchists claimed‘Tradition and Honour’ and a belief in the army, right or wrong, a dogma which mere fact was unable to penetrate.

Popular outrage forced a retrial of Dreyfus but hostile military judges and widespread perjury by prosecution witnesses saw Dreyfus sentenced to ten more years, a grotesque result which, together with a failed right-wing coup attempt against the Republican government, forced the government to seek social peace by proposing a pardon for Dreyfus, which would have left him legally free but morally stained, and a general amnesty which would have left the top conspirators, forgers and perjurers immune from prosecution.

Faced with another decade of Devil’s Island, however, Dreyfus not unreasonably opted for the pardon whilst the Marxist leader of France’s Socialist Party, Jean Jaurés, launched a campaign to clear Dreyfus which culminated in Dreyfus’ first fair trial and full exoneration in 1906.

Harris’ particular take on the Dreyfus Affair is to challenge what she calls the myth of righteous and pure Dreyfusards battling a wicked, anti-Dreyfusard right. She documents the existence of Catholics on both sides of the struggle (liberal and republican versus reactionary and monarchical), writers and intellectuals split on the issue, and spiritualists cohabiting with scientists under the Dreyfusard watchword of reason. This, however, is merely an unremarkable fact of broad coalition politics.

Harris’ other conclusion, that, “on right and left”,positions on the Dreyfus Affair were shaped by long-standing emotional animosities rather than by evidence alone, is but an illustration that in politics everything is connected. Certainly, some Dreyfusards were influenced by their opposition to Catholic Jesuits in the anti-Dreyfusard camp whom they, rightly, saw as “pre-Enlightenment throwbacks”. For their part, many Catholic priests used Dreyfus as a pretext to oppose a Republic which was winding back clerical privilege and promoting secularisation.

That the politico-legal fate of one individual can act as an emotional lightning-rod in polarising society along a left-right divide with truth and justice pitted against lies and prejudice is therefore neither surprising nor invalidates what Harris laments as the “pervasive impact of Marxist ideas” which allegedly “privilege thought over feeling”. Harris’ coolness towards Marxism also biases her book towards elite, rather than mass, politics, with her focus on an ideological battle amongst intellectuals.

Harris is, however, a “Dreyfusard at heart” and she recognises that the “energy, passion and enthusiasm that fired the idealism of a generation” a century ago is essential for political progress today.